Because He Could Not Stop for Death
by birthsister
Summary: While considering his options for life without his brother, Dean spends an unexpected night with Tessa while grieving for Sam at the end of season 5. Warning: some scenes may be triggering for straddling the non con line. I assure you, Tessa is an agent of Death, she could leave at any time and she is a willing participant. Enjoy the show. (Complete)
1. Chapter 1

Because He Could Not Stop for Death...

..she kindly stopped for Dean...

It was the empty bed that bothered him the most. The plainness of it, the sameness, the _wrongness_. No rumpled blankets, no wrinkled sheets, no 6'4" frame crammed untidily corner to corner across it. It never changed and the static of it was maddening. Even on hunts when they were tracking from opposite angles, there was always some proof of life: wadded up balls of clothes in the corner, steam in the shower, blood on the sheets. Something.

The second night he tossed his duffle on other bed just so he had something besides the unmussed avocado bedspread to stare at. So that in the finite period of time between waking and remembering Sammy was gone, and the seconds it took to reach for the whiskey bottle, he could fool himself into feeling a little less alone. On the third night he tugged at the covers to expose the clean, flat sheets, arranged the pillows the way Sammy liked them (piled side to side, so he could roll over and burrow in the middle of the night, like he had since he was old enough not to smother himself) and left the whole mess hoping it would buy him a few more seconds in that twilight place between dream and grief. By the end of the week, when his phone was finally silent of even Bobby's calls, he ventured out to find someone, anyone, to fill the growing pit inside himself.

The bar was like any other dive bar he'd ever been in over the years, maybe a little dirtier, a little greasier than the average, but no place that he couldn't sit his ass on a bar stool and not feel welcome in. If he had wanted to feel welcome anywhere right now. Mostly, he just wanted more liquor and a nice rack to get lost in. The liquor was cheap enough or he was just pitiful enough that the barmaid, a cute brunette with a tiny frame that reminded him just a bit too much of Jo Harvelle for him to feel entirely comfortable, took whatever bills he threw uncounted on the bar and kept the bottle tipped over his shot glass until last call. The rack came attached to a blonde with a rocking little body in a tight Ramone's t shirt and jeans that were painted on, but a smile that revealed teeth like a picket fence. He decided if he just bent her over the hood of the Impala it wouldn't matter if she smiled at him or not.

Dean excused himself to the rest room and splashed cold water from a rusting faucet onto his face. He stared at the wide eyes and sunken cheeks that looked at him from the cracked mirror and didn't recognize his own reflection. Behind him, a urinal flushed and he ducked his head to the faucet again. When he came back up, swiping his wet hands through his close cropped hair, the largest biker he had ever seen wedged himself between Dean and the door and paused a moment to look at him.

"Dude," the biker said, one hand on the door handle, "Whatever you're doing to yourself, a bullet would be faster." He looked as though he might say more, then maneuvered his bulk through the door and into the anemic light of a bar breaking down for the night.

Dean followed a short time later, the smell of the urinal following him into the narrow walkway where he wrinkled his nose in distaste. Scrubbing hard at his face, he paused a moment to watch that amazing ass kneel on a bar stool, idly pivoting back and forth in boredom as she waited for him. He scratched roughly at his hair and realized he hadn't showered all week, his hair spikey and lank under his fingers. Most jarring was the realization that the odor in the narrow hallway wasn't coming entirely from the bathroom, either, and the stink of a weeks worth of cheap whiskey and night sweats clung to him like the stench of sulphur. Sammy would be downright embarrassed to be seen with him right now. He wasn't so far gone as to realize that the only kind of girl who would go home with a man in his condition was probably not the sort of girl he should probably bring home. He flipped up the collar on his leather jacket and quietly slipped out the back entrance. There are few things worse than being stood up on a date, but being stood up on a one night stand was certainly one of them. This was the sort of crap he'd pull when he was seventeen, but now he was just too tired to care. The Impala rumbled to life around him as he left behind that amazing ass and the rack that came with it twisting by herself on a frayed bar stool.

Just like the bed had all week, the passenger side of the Impala sang with wrongness as he drove back from the bar. This wasn't something making a phone call could fix. There was no driving the next town over, or even three states away to collect his little brother and get on with the next case. No amount of waiting for Sammy to get his head out of his ass and decide he was a member of the family after all was going to put him back in that seat. Dean couldn't sell his soul, his car, or his left nut to make this right. He couldn't even pass a fucking drive thru without thinking he should pick Sasquatch up a salad and a Diet Coke. So he didn't eat. What he did decide, as he stumbled through the hotel room door an hour before and caught another whiff of himself, was that he didn't want his corpse stinking up the place even before he had started to decay.

Dean balanced in the shower while the water made the lazy transition from scalding to arctic, palms flat against the tile in front of him and head bent. It sluiced down the sides of his face and pooled under his nose, forcing him to take gasping, shallow breaths or risk drowning. He only dragged himself out of the tub to stand on the chipped linoleum when he noticed the white noise in his head start to quiet. He wasn't particularly interested in sobering up, although the threat of it lingered at the corner of his consciousness, it was just that inside the buzz in his head there seemed to be this small still place of clarity and he wanted to take a moment to explore it.

There was no fixing this. Sammy was gone. Dead and gone. And not even to an eternal Thanksgiving dinner in the sky, or to spend eternity with cold pizza and a stray dog, or anywhere else he could imagine Sammy wanting to be. He was in the Pit. And Dean knew that if he thought his own tour of duty in Hell had been bad, Sammy's was a whole universe full of worse. Dean had been one of many souls sliced and diced and left to rot on the rack, but Sammy had the full and undivided attention of two of the biggest pricks to ever grace Eternity. How could he have let him say yes? Their malingering had cost them precious time. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. The what if's rattled around in his head like loaded dice. Maybe if Dean had agreed to be Michael's vessel, they could at least have had each other. It's not like it would have been the first time they'd had their asses handed to them in stereo. Instead, Dean felt like he had condemned Sam to a long and lonely road with no one there to walk it with him. The bottom line was; he had let Sammy down.

Dean took the clean clothes he had hung for himself off the hook on the back of the door and dressed, his mind still wandering, imagining Sam in that Place. His tender hearted brother, the one who could never intentionally hurt a thing, the one who would almost rather take a beating than give one, the one who had turned his face away in distaste when they had bled those demons dry. Bled them so Sammy would have enough mojo to welcome Lucifer in and not incinerate on the spot. Sammy, the one who had wanted nothing more than to leave this infernal life behind and marry a nice girl and have a nice life had become one of the monsters. He would spend the rest of his immortal life being tormented by them, and Dean would spend the rest of his immortal life being haunted by the fact he had had one job. "Take care of your brother, Dean." And he had failed. Dean was good at fixing things. He could fix his car, he could exorcise a demon, he had even managed to bring Sammy back from the dead a time or two, but there was just no fixing this one.

There was no where left to go. Nothing left to do. After a week, the only comfort he had was the heft of his .45 and the weight of a whiskey bottle, and now even the whiskey bottle was getting light on him.

It wasn't so much a solution as all he had left. For a moment he felt bad-there would be blood splatter. Someone was going to have to clean up after him and he'd mostly likely ruin a perfectly good hotel room. He considered finishing the job in the tub, but decided he at least deserved to go out sitting up. Like a man. Like a Hunter.

The things civilians don't think about.

The click and slide of the clip was unnerving in the silence of the room. It was a jarring reminder of what he was leaving behind and how he was getting there. The chambering of a round was too loud after the soft rustle and scratch of the pen against the paper. The note, written in tidy script on hotel stationery and detailing the disposition of his remains sat propped on the tv, away from ground zero. He didn't want any grey matter tying his corpse up in red tape. His few belongings were already in the Impala waiting for Bobby to dispose of as he saw fit. He wanted the shortest route to getting his body back to Bobby for a good salting and burning, so the note detailed his own need for a quick end after his brother's death from a lingering illness (what else could you call a possession, really). He counted on this little podunk police department to only perform a perfunctory autopsy and release him within a day or two. The clean up would take longer than the investigation.

A second letter, to Lisa, sat next to Bobby's, folded neatly in an envelope waiting for Bobby to mail. After a moment of thought, he slid two quarters next to it for postage. He had less to say to her, but felt he at least owed her some kind of an explanation. Especially after the last time he had showed up on her doorstep. He didn't mention anything about where he was going, only that she and Ben would be safe, and he wished them a good life. It all sounded trite and contrived, but he didn't have any better way to say what was on his mind. Sammy had always been the one good with words.

He picked up Sammy's 9 mm, the only thing of his he had kept after Detroit, and weighed it against his own .45, one in each hand. Ah, the debates that had raged over those two guns.

"Bigger isn't always better," Sammy had said.

Dean had grunted. "Yeah, says Sasquatch."

He considered using Sammy's gun to finish the job, but then decided it would be like spitting in a dead man's face after he had promised Sam he'd make a life somewhere.

He paused a moment after slipping the safety off his weapon, adjusted a moment in his chair, as though comfort mattered. Paused again.

"Are you here?" he called out to the air. "I," he didn't know what to say, how to call Death's emissary out, but for some reason it was suddenly important to know he wasn't dying alone. "I know you're there. You don't have to hide from me."

There was a rush of air, like angel wings, spring breezes, and cold winter nights. And then she was there. Her black hair still hung down her back thick and straight, a black leather jacket over a grey silk shirt and jeans. Casual Friday for Death's Fedex girl. Her grey eyes regarded him without empathy or animosity, although her lips tipped upward in the hint of a smile.

"Tessa," he said, setting both weapons back on the table.

"Dean," she crossed her arms as she slid into the chair opposite him. After a moment of silently watching each other, she shrugged out of the jacket and hung it across the back of her chair, as casual as any friend settling in for a visit.

"So, you're here." Dean leaned forward and rested a hand on each gun, as though Tessa needed a quiet reminder of why she had come. "Is this where you say 'I told you so'?"

Tessa pursed her lips and looked chagrined. "Why would I do that, Dean? What purpose would it serve?"

Dean shrugged, sat back in his chair in an angry slouch. "You _were_ right, you know." He stared at her, perhaps trying to find some lost part of himself in her face, before waving a gun around carelessly, as one might gesture with a drink in their hand. "The angels didn't have anything good planned for me. I'm just kind of like the girl who got passed around at the party."

His lips thinned out into an angry line, and Tessa could see two little dimples form under the scruff of his beard. "Did you know? Did you know what they had planned and you just let me and Sammy walk into it like a couple of assholes stomping on a hornets nest?"

Tessa pondered him silently for a moment. There was nothing left to him but hurt, his soul as flayed as any body stripped down to muscle and sinew. He'd been wounded when she had seen him a year ago on his spirit walk. Wounded, but like a soldier that didn't know how to stay down no matter how many bullets he took. This man was ready to lay down on the battle field and put the gun to his own head.

"I didn't know anything, Dean," she said, with a small shake of her head. "It was an educated guess. I know the nature of angels, and rarely do they ever have the best interests of humanity in mind. It was a fair assumption they didn't have your, or Sam's, best interest in mind, either. We're all just tools to them. You, me, and sometimes even each other."

Dean nodded, if not satisfied with the answer at least unwilling to expend anymore energy on the subject. "So, does that mean, yknow, this is 'it'?" Tessa always left him feeling...unbalanced. Today, she was a cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless, even if she didn't have the answers he wanted.

"It's your choice, Dean. And while technically I can't interfere, I have a soft spot for you." She leaned forward a moment and inclined her head, mirroring his posture. "Or, you could call it professional courtesy." She sat back, crossed her legs and folded her hands neatly in her lap. Eyes that had seen the fall of Rome watched him carefully. For a moment he had a dizzying vision of falling into her irises and watching the birth of stars before his hand clutched the engraved metal of his .45 and he snapped back into himself. Snapped back into his own thoughts like startling awake from a dream of falling.

"I'm out of choices, Tessa." Restlessly, he set down his gun then picked it up again from the table, rested it in his lap without taking his hand off it. "But, I'm glad it's you."

"I called in a favor or two. You're still the one who got away, Dean. Whether you come with me today or a century from now, it will always be me who leads you from one life to the next." She sat perfectly still, her voice like a calm lake.

"I'm ok with that." He looked confused for a moment, glancing to the right and left of himself. "Wait a second, I'm not, I didn't...I'm not dead already, am I?" Whoa, wouldn't that be like eating the last cookie in the box without realizing it.

"No." She smiled indulgently at him, as one would smile at a child who had just discovered something the rest of the world took for granted. "Let's just say, the die has been cast, but hasn't landed yet. You're still breathing, you haven't even clicked the safety off, from what I can see. But Dean," the smooth surface of her voice now seemed to eddy with an emotion Dean wasn't used to hearing from a Reaper. She sounded sad, almost regretful. "Oh Dean, the despair weighs on you like the earth already weighs heavy on your grave. I saw you when you wanted to live. I met you when the door should have closed on your soul without a moments hesitation and you kept it open by sheer force of will. But now, there's nothing. There's nothing left inside you, nothing for you here. But me."

"Was that supposed to be a pep talk? Because wow, lady..." Dean dipped his head and twisted it side to side, a habit she had noticed the first time she had met him, as though he were trying to shake his thoughts into some kind of sensible order.

"No pep talk. Just the truth. Remember, I can't interfere, so I'm just stating the facts." She leaned forward, fingers laced together between them, and held his gaze. "You are so etched with despair you can already feel your own death creeping along the edge of your soul. The soul that would rather have killed me," she held her hand up when he opened his mouth to object, "I know you wouldn't now, Dean, your objections are unnecessary. But the soul that would have killed me then, if you knew how to kill a Reaper, rather than cross over, would now curl in on itself and be led away like a lamb to the slaughter."

She was right. He had been dying slowly for years, really. Famine had said as much to him, back when Sammy was still alive and such things mattered. If he had been empty then, he was even emptier now. He felt like a nameless, faceless void inside himself. Skin stretched painfully over a sucking black hole. He had already made his decision. He clicked the safety off. It felt like all the best parts of him had fallen into that pit with Sammy and now he was just empty. All a bullet would do is shake loose that last little scrap that was still hanging on, like a withered vine to the stone wall of his mind.

"Do you usually," Dean scrubbed at his face with his free hand, his movements slow and heavy. "Do you see them-" he waved the gun at her, "yknow..."

"Do I usually witness the death?" She finished for him. Dean nodded.

Her manner was quiet and calm, the expectant waiting of someone unbothered and untouched by the myriad pains of human existence. She had taken infants and old men to her with the same passive grace as she had stood on battlefields and collected the bloody and confused souls still too shell shocked to object to the abrupt nature of her appearance or their departure. She moved through the world unfettered by human uncertainty, and yet, there was something about Dean Winchester that caused tremors in the eternal calm of her existence.

"Sometimes," she finally answered, "I just...instinctively...know when a soul is ready to be collected. I may arrive a little early or a little late, but the timing is irrelevant to the turning of the Universe so long as I do arrive. It's much as a farmer knows when it's time to harvest his wheat, and all that matters is that he does so before the field starts to go fallow."

She watched Dean, her face steady, unchanging. "If you're asking if I'll be bothered by it," she flicked a finger toward the gun in his hand to indicate what 'it' she was talking about. "No."

Tessa didn't elaborate that the physical detritus of the human condition wouldn't effect her as much as the thought of Dean's body as broken as his spirit. It caused a physical ache she couldn't quite identify.

She had meant what she had said. Even when his human body had been on the brink of death, his spirit had fought her off with a determination she hadn't seen before or since from any of the many souls she collected. But here, now, his body whole and healthy, she knew he didn't even need the human weapon he held in his hand. His spirit was so shattered by the loss of his brother that he could very well lie down in the bed now and be dead in a day or two. A gentle brush of her consciousness against his, the same way she had known to appear to him as a pretty brunette four years ago, now only found the crumbling warren of a broken spirit.

He looked up, as though suddenly inspired. "Were you with him? Were you there, with Sammy?"

Her face didn't change, but her eyes flicked downward for a moment. "Sam didn't die. He was removed from the world outside the natural order of things. None of us were with him. All he had was you."

She watched his eyes go glassy. It was almost more heartbreaking than if he had collapsed in a sodden mess at her feet. Inside her, a tide slowly rose. Centuries of calm ebbing and flowing in the presence of this man who had intrigued her since the day he grasped her hard and pulled her away from his body. She could have taken him by force, if she had wanted, but that wasn't her style.

She reached out a hand to touch his human frailty. To offer a seemingly human comfort as she had that night in the hospital room, the first time he should have died. The first time he slid through the cracks in the natural order of things. Dean turned his head into her touch and she felt his human warmth against her palm. Felt a salty tear seep into her skin and his breath huff out in a rush along her wrist. When his shoulders shook with quiet sobs it seemed natural for her to kneel before him, offer what comfort she could and hold him as she had seen humans do for each other.

"_Why," the other Reaper, Jacob, had asked her. "Why do you want this one when he isn't even yours?"_

"_He was mine, once," she had replied. She had no other reply because she had no other explanation. The whole of the Universe shook with the damning of Lucifer and Michael, and Sam Winchester with them. Even as she continued to collect souls, her awareness of Dean Winchester's time approaching had niggled at the back of her consciousness until she had approached his Reaper, slipped herself out of space and time to hold that place for Dean. To take him if he needed her, to release him if the flame of life rekindled in his damp soul._

"_You cannot interfere." Jacob had reminded her. "You cannot tilt the scales to collect a soul you lost, and you cannot weigh them elsewise to save a soul you owe."_

"_Release him to me, then," she had bargained. Bargained for the soul of a man who had only touched her once, twice, and left her pondering his existence the way even emperors had never impressed her. "Release him to me now so that whenever his time comes, he is mine to collect. Then this droplet in the lake of time will be irrelevant, his passing or his remaining unrelated to my intentions."_

_Jacob had shrugged, waved a hand vaguely in her direction as though the whole matter was unimportant. "He's yours. But for neither vengeance nor kindness. His fate-"_

"_Is his own." She finished for him. "His thread has already been shorn and tied and unraveled and still he's connected to both the mortal realm and beyond. Even if I had considered violating the natural order of things, he's already done that well enough on his own." She winked herself out of existence in one place and rethought herself here, in this room, as Dean scribbled his final words to the last two people who meant anything to him. She didn't need to be told how to do her job, even if this particular man caused her to step to the left of her usual job description._

It was impossible to tell who moved first, Dean's sobbing breath hot gainst her neck, her fingers slipping through his still damp hair in a mimicry of human comfort. The scent of the hotel soap was sharp to her, his own scent just underneath something between the smell of summer rain and good whiskey. His lips on hers startled both of them and she had just enough time to wonder how far this was crossing a line before she felt his tongue slip between her gasping lips.


	2. Chapter 2

He remembered her kiss from the spirit world but everything there had been barely real and mostly intangible. Her touch had been like the memory of a touch, neither warm nor cold and devoid of all the humanness of a mortal woman. His own reaction, one fairly predictable when kissing an attractive woman, had been imperfect and tainted by the sudden memory of his own near death two years before. His between death experience was pre-empted by his near death experience, and quite honestly there wasn't getting much nearer to death than the Reaper's lips pressed affectionately against his own.

At least, he had thought then there wasn't anything closer. Life, as usual, was adept at proving him wrong.

He expected her to be cold against his mortal skin. Cool, like the grave. He anticipated the loamy scent of fresh turned earth, that her touch would stop his heart and he would drift off into her arms and leave his body behind. But she was warm, her illusion of life complete. In some ways, more complete than even his own. The tongue that flicked against his lips tasted of fresh air and crisp apples, she smelled of lilies and night blooming jasmine while his heart beat a last panicked tattoo in response to the feel of her body against his.

Dean knew he was frantic. Manic, even, his .45 still caught in his hand as he clutched Tessa to him like a drowning man holding fast to his last lifeline. Her body, firm and substantial against his after a week of painful nothingness, caused a sudden rush of feeling as though running warm water over snow chilled hands. She cupped the side of his face as she kissed him, grounding him, steadying him. He had her pinned under his body on the floor, his usual finesse lost as he tugged at her shirt, hands struggling against the unyielding silk until he finally gave up, released his weapon to skitter along the cheap hotel carpet, and pillowed her head with his hands as his tongue explored her mouth like lovers long parted.

He raised his head to look into her eyes, some small spark of his old self roaring to the surface. "Is this even allowed?"

She smiled, a brief tug at the corners of her lips. "Ordinarily I'd say no. But you are already so far outside the natural order of things, I don't think the rules even apply to you anymore." More accurately, she hoped not. Even conversing with him in a corporeal form was generally frowned upon. Death himself had his own odd hobbies and he was inclined to forgive her the occasional indulgence. But she couldn't even imagine what sort of reprimand this kind of behavior with Dean Winchester could earn her.

His fingers curled in the thick black length of her hair, his kisses painfully hard against her mouth as the weight of him pressed between her legs. Once or twice their teeth bumped and Tessa pondered the coppery taste of her own blood in her mouth. She didn't object to the rough handling, one hand pressed against his face, the other sliding through the short hair at the back of his neck. An observer would find them an odd coupling, one wild and frenetic, the other calm and passive under his assault.

As she cataloged her body's response to the feel of him, the rough touch of skin against skin, the pressure of his erection between her legs and her own corresponding wetness, she reminded herself this changed nothing. This influenced nothing. For Dean, this was little more than a wake.

His breath came in ragged gasps against her neck, and she followed his lead, nuzzling against his pulse point and breathing deep the clean soapy scent of him. The ginger scruff of a seven day beard rubbed against the tender skin of her cheek and when his hands slid under her shirt again, she allowed hers to find the hem of his and wander along bare skin. She remembered their first meeting, how she could see past his soul's conception of himself, see the raw skin of fresh injuries and the hard knots of old scars. By their second meeting he had been rewritten, the angel's mark on his shoulder a neon sign to the metaphysical world that he was something altogether new. New to himself, too. This man on top of her now was another a clean slate, perhaps the angel's touch the only thing that had even kept him alive this long, Heaven's power lingering in his pores and brushing against his soul.

His thumb brushed a nipple and she choked against his lips, startled by the sensation and her own reaction to it. He grabbed her breast in his large hand and she arched against him, a millennia of control lost in that microsecond of feeling. She was supposed to be above such base instincts, but Dean Winchester didn't know that, and for the moment she was willing to forget it.

Dean was losing the war with her shirt, settling for a hand up under her bra like a teenager. She smiled at his huff of frustration and strained to get his shirt over his head, revealing a body inconsistent with the man she knew he was. The skin was smooth and perfect and unblemished, the spirit underneath a pitted, dark thing. Only a black protection tattoo marred the perfection of his chest, a sigil of power that throbbed like a second heartbeat to her. Inside him, like delicate framework to a cage that has been left long abandoned, she sensed the Enochian carved on his ribs.

She explored the ridges of his back with tender fingertips, mouthed lightly at the freckles sprinkled over his shoulders, and sighed. There was something to be said for the steady comfort of centuries spent fearless in the certainty of one's own power, one's own place, one's appointment within the cogs of the Universe. But this was a rare luxury for a Reaper. Always an observer, never a participant in the lives that she touched, there were moments when a glimmer of longing flitted through her consciousness like a tiny bird blown astray from its flock by warm winds that whispered of the heat of humanity.

Dean, teetering on the cusp of his own mortality, wasn't so much like a tiny bird but rather an enormous raptor eying her the way an eagle would eye an small mouse. And she was laying herself out to be devoured.

Dean reached between their bodies and grappled with belts and buttons and closures. It was all awkward and inelegant and while part of him cared enough to notice he had all the skill of a twelve year old, the rest of him barreled forward with the determination of a steam train off its rails. Aggravated, he sat back and ripped viciously at Tessa's jeans, the button popping open and the zipper destroyed, giving with an angry, tortured growl similar to his own. Tessa took the opportunity to slip her own shirt over her head, exposing a simple plain white bra underneath. Dean cocked his head to the side, like a baffled dog.

"Not what you were expecting?" Tessa still smiled in her Mona Lisa way, one corner of her mouth slightly uptilted as the bra seemed to shift and shimmer, finally coalescing into a grey satin demi bra. His eyebrows shot straight up and his head jerked back.

"_THAT_ wasn't quite what I was expecting." His hand tentatively reached out and brushed over her breast. "You can influence my reality. How do I even know any of this is real? How do I know you don't really look like," he rolled his hand forward at the wrist, asking her to fill in the blank without his having to say it.

"My true form?" Tessa obliged by answering for him. Dean nodded, his lips pulled back to reveal his dimples again. Tessa's smile widened. "I am a spirit encased in a body, just like you. My only influence is how you perceive that body." The bra shimmered again and Dean blinked his eyes, fighting the sensation that he was suddenly looking through warped glass. When his vision cleared the bra had disappeared altogether exposing perfect, pale breasts. Was that another spark she saw behind his eye, a brighter flame? It was hard to tell as his face slid resolutely back into angry lines and his mouth descended roughly on a breast, obviously no longer concerned with the finer details of their encounter.

She arched into the sensation. Pressed into the gravity of him. The brush of teeth against her nipple, the suck and release, his hands deep in the flesh of her breasts, holding and kneeding in time with his clever tongue. She ached between her legs, a dull distant throb that grew more insistent with each passing moment. Her pulse fluttered against the inseam of her jeans and she shifted her weight, suddenly anxious for release. She felt the weave of the carpet under her fingers, the tiny hairs along Dean's arms as she slid her hands from the nubby hotel floor to his smooth skin, to slip them around the curve of his shoulders as he nipped at her exposed flesh. Her own breath was a bellows in her ears, breathing itself almost a guilty pleasure. Feeling the flow of air down her throat, feeling her ribs expand against his sharp animal teeth and the catch and pull of her voice in response was almost as decadent as the sex was promising to be. She cried out when the sensation edged towards pain, his teeth dragging along her ribs, steering south to the sensitive skin of her belly as his hands gripped the edges of her jeans and pulled hard. Even the edge of pain was like an electric current between her legs and her heavy breaths became a long, low moan.

He rose on his knees, tugging furiously at her pants as she pushed up on her elbows and watched him down the length of her body. Her skin was mottled with mouth sized red patches, some starting to bruise. She pressed one tentatively with a fingertip and watched the color wash out to white then flare back to a bright, angry red, bringing with it a sharp ache. She pulled her attention away from the unfamiliar pain and looked at Dean, kneeling shirtless between her legs, his bare chest heaving like her own, his nostrils flared like an animal catching a scent. His eyes...Tessa swallowed. Dean wasn't quite empty anymore, but she wondered briefly if what was being rekindled was something she even wanted to let loose on the world. She reached out a hand, lover reaching toward lover, fingertps barely brushing skin, and considered reaching past the flawed flesh and just taking the soul. Taking the cracked and injured thing into herself before it could rebuild the strength to fight her. Before Dean, perhaps, became the demon Winchester (oh, she had heard the stories, eternity was not so large a place as word didn't get around). Yes, take him before the demon Winchester was let loose on humanity and he was refused entry at the gates of Hell even if he found them.

"Take these off," his tone implied he expected nothing less than complete obedience as his natural husk dropped a dangerous octave lower.

A cool bead of sweat slid down her spine, causing a chain reaction of goosebumps to prickle her arms. She paused with her thumbs hooked in her waistband, her heart racing. If she had been mortal, this wouldn't be fun anymore.

He bent forward and gripped her wrists. "Not like that." She cocked her head at him, found that still, silent place inside herself again and waited for him to let go. He didn't. She saw the sweat on him, the barely controlled violence lurking just under the surface. "Do it like you did before."

He let go of her wrists, sat back on his heels, waiting. She smiled from that motionless lake at the center of her being and started to shimmy out of the jeans. She wanted to say something witty and human, but the words felt thick in her throat, her tongue coppery and heavy. The last time she had felt like this, there had been a sickle to her neck.

She pushed back with her heels and found the edge of the bed braced against her back. Her boots were in the way, she realized. She'd never be able to get the pants off, not without reaching forward. Reaching into his personal space like reaching into the cage of a hungry lion, sliding the zippers down and freeing her feet all before he pounced. She could just...think...them away, but that would be giving in to this particular fetish and she wasn't willing to give him that power, not yet. He watched her, his jaw jumping. Tessa could almost recognize the look on his face, she'd seen it every time she collected a soul from a crime scene. The murderer, angry at his victim, angry at himself, and already planning how best to dispose of the body. She carefully drew one leg up and slid herself into a sitting position, her pants sliding down past her ass with the friction of the carpet against her backside. Dean rushed in, arms braced on either side of her head, his mouth level with her ear.

"Turn around." He didn't sit back to give her room to move but stayed intimidatingly close. Tessa's power flared inside of her, fear and lust forcing her to tamp it down while she considered her options. She could vanish right now, give herself time and perspective. She could pull herself into the slipstream of eons and consider this from the viewpoint a million lifetimes of experience had given her. This was not a situation best dealt with on the floor of a cheap hotel room, crushed under the weight of a man whose soul was littered with the debris of a life no mortal was meant to survive. Not influenced by her own longing and aching skin, not by his bite marks and her sweat slick breasts and not by her slicker cunt. The decision to go forward, to turn and run, to kill him on the spot shouldn't be made anywhere near this fractured human.

She already knew what she would do, because she knew this soul as she knew no other. He was the one who got away, he was the one she had lingered with not once, not twice, but now three times which was three times more than she had ever interacted with anyone else.

She turned inside his angry embrace, like turning her back on an injured animal, her legs hobbled by the unyielding denim, and arched her bare back against his chest.

"What do you want, Dean?" she asked. Guile wasn't in her nature. She supposed a human woman, unafraid of the man behind her, would stretch herself out on the bed in front of her, lengthen her body to cat like proportions and entice the inevitable. Or maybe fear would leave her trembling, hoping for a swift but merciful end, or hoping complicity would buy her eventual freedom. Instead, Tessa waited, her mind cataloging each human reaction, noting each flare of emotion, savoring the scent of sweat and arousal.

She felt the soft prickle of cool air drift along her back as he moved imperceptibly away from her. Heard the soft pop of the button of his jeans, the harsh swipe of the zipper, the thick rustle of fabric and then the heat of his body as his chest made contact with her back. Tessa imagined him shoving his jeans off, their descent over his ass, his erection prominent between his body and hers. She wanted to see him. Tessa might not be human, but she could appreciate that Dean Winchester was an attractive man. She started to turn her head when she felt his hand on the back of her neck, pushing her roughly onto the low bed, his hands shoving her pants the rest of the way to her knees, his cock hard and painful as a steel rod pressed against her tail bone as he closed the short distance between their two bodies. She felt him shift against her back, his hand slipping around her thigh to find her wet and waiting, his breath rushing out of him as fingertips made contact with her. She cried out, buried her face against the ugly green bedspread when fingers spread her open, his thumb brushing against the nub at her center. Her gut clenched, and then his fingers were gone and she was panting and sweating from the feel of him all over her.

Satisfied that she was ready for him, he moved away, leaving her back chilled and exposed again before grabbing her roughly by the hips and forcing her up further onto the bed. Her nipples dragged against the bedspread, sending a frisson of sensation from chest to center. As he angled the tip of himself against her, she froze. There may have been some details here she hadn't considered. She tried to pull away, twist around, but his hands gripped harder, the bulk of his body moved against her so escape was impossible. Again she considered shedding her corporeal body, winking into her true form, but instead breathed deep against the rising tide of panic. She clutched at the bedspread with both hands and moaned in spite of herself.

His hips rocked forward, cock braced against her entrance. A pause as he started to enter her, as though getting his bearings. A warm chuff of air against her neck as a hand brushed her hair to the side and his mouth nestled against her shoulder. She felt the skin of herself stretched around him, the unfamiliar feeling of being entered, her body invaded. Her back dipped, her ass shifting with him poised just inside her and she felt the stretch a little more, just enough now to be uncomfortable. Her moan changed pitch to a low keen as this virginal body tried to accommodate him. His hand slid into the narrow space between her body and the bed frame and found her clit again. Nimble fingers fondled her, flicked against her, smoothed the stretched skin until her legs trembled before his fingers danced away again. She risked reaching her own hand between her legs, sliding fingertips along her own folds and the length of him that pressed partly inside her. She shivered at the weight of him against her hand before he batted her hand away. Then his hands were on either side of her hips and he surged forward with a single thrust, pulling her hard against him as she cried out, the pain sharp and immediate and an orgasm hard on top of it.

There was no time to get on top of the waves as they rode her, as he rode her from crest to trough. The tight skin of her body was forced open, a confusing jumble of pain and gratification as the tremor of another orgasm built low in her belly. The sound of their flesh slapping together was an undercurrent, a low staccato rhythm to match their voices crying out, high and low octaves in time with each other. Every thrust was punctuated by a hard growl, an animal taking his mate, her own response high and loud as she thrust back against him. He pressed the entire weight of his body onto her, his arms coming down over her own as he pinned them against the bed so that, had she been mortal, there would have been no escape. As if there had been any before.

It was a desperate and violent coupling. If Tessa had been mortal it might have been a wholly different experience. Instead, the pleasure piggy backed on the fear, the pain twined itself around the throbbing, quivering pulse inside of her until it was like a storm surge that threatened to overwhelm her. She followed it dizzingly to its depths, gasping for more. Harder. Longer. Deeper. Just, more. The rhythm he set was so fast that she didn't so much feel him slide in and out of her as he was there one moment, gone the next, then filling her again without any middle pieces. She teetered maddeningly on the edge of her second orgasm, her body fluttering around him until she dragged an arm free of his grasp and pressed her hand against herself, feeling her own center slick with her moisture, feeling the long weight of his cock pounding in and out of her. His response to her seeking hand was to wrap an arm tightly around her waist, pivot, and maneuver them so that she was facing the floor, her head down and her ass in the air. He pressed deeper into her, his cock stretching and seeking the depths of her until the tremor built into another wave that finally crested, Dean still fucking her through her body's frantic attempts to clutch him, hold him, still him long enough to compartmentalize everything she was feeling.

When the breath rushed out of him in a long guttural exclamation, his thrust strained against her, into her, through her. His hips rose so that the rigid length of him nearly lifted her off her knees and found new places to touch deep inside her. She thought for a moment by the force of his thrusts that he meant to somehow cleave her in two. There was one more deep stroke and then she felt the weight of his body collapse against her back, his breath hot against her hair as an arm wrapped around her belly and she knew the storm had passed. Tessa felt his chest vibrating against her back, heard the ragged wet breath, until he collapsed bonelessly to the side. He held her tight so she had no choice but to move with him so that they lay on the floor together, his sobs muffled against her thick hair, his cock still slick and half erect against her back, the emptiness of his withdrawal painful.

All of her hurt. There were carpet burns on her knees and elbows. That part of her that made her a woman ached in time with the beating of her heart. Her pants still bunched around her legs and there were bite marks from breast to thigh. Even her lip hurt where Dean had accidentally drawn blood. Her limbs felt limp from overuse.

He trembled against her, a deep shuddering breath that seemed to release all the tension in him.

"I'm sorry," Dean whispered against her hair. Tessa didn't think he was actually speaking to her.

She tried to move her legs, still bound by the pants. Giving up the now irrelevant battle of wills she shaped reality so that they lay neatly folded on a chair, her boots paired together on the floor underneath the table. She noticed the fine pattern of goosebumps that sprang up on her exposed skin, and Dean must have too because he pulled the bedspread across both of them, careful to tuck it's frayed ends over her shoulders and under her neck.

"God," he said, "this is such a Sammy thing to do." He draped an arm over her, disguised a sniffle with a loud masculine inhale followed by a sharp cough. The arm left her for a moment and she could imagine him scrubbing at his face, pulling the corners of his mouth down in an artificial frown before swiping at his nose.

She moved uncomfortably against him, equally trying to ignore the aches while trying to commit them to memory. Her legs felt sluggish as they bumped into his under the cover and she wondered if she would be able to even stand up while still in her human form.

"He had a terrible track record, these past few years. Him and the monsters...Sammy's usually the one to go for one of the monsters."

"Is that what you think I am, Dean? One of the 'monsters'?" She didn't know if that bothered her or not. She knew when his world was still a black and white place she fell on the wrong side of the dividing line, but she had hoped their relationship had evolved beyond that. Perhaps it slid into one of the grey, twilit places. Not long ago, he would have killed her without thought or remorse. It was maybe one of the things that drew her to him, that he was as much an instrument of death as she was. Now, he had become one more cog in the heavenly wheel, albeit one that now turned closer in time with hers.

They shifted awkwardly to face each other and she nestled into the crook of his arm. It felt comfortable and natural. Dean stared at her in the dim light of early morning. She watched his eyes flick back and forth across her face, then trace the length of her covered body. There was a quiet assessment, an inner accounting before he lurched to his feet and extended a hand to her. She wasn't sure what he was offering.

"C'mon. I'm guessing you don't get out much. You don't need to be down there on a crappy carpet where there's a slightly less crappy bed to lay in." He jerked his head toward the bed. Not the one with pillows piled side to side on it, but the one that looked like a cyclone had swept over it. Tessa took his hand and let him pull her to her feet, but didn't move toward him or the messy bed.

"If you only get out of the house ever few hundred years, or so, I should let you know that wasn't my best work." He cupped her face, lowered his lips to hers and kissed her tenderly.

His eyes glanced at the marks on her breasts and he winced. He shook his head, scratched awkwardly at a hairless chest, otherwise unconscious of his own nudity. "I'm, I'm sorry Tessa. I really am. If you, if you just want to go, I wouldn't blame you."

"That all depends on you, Dean." He looked confused for a moment, until she let her gaze fall behind him to where the .45 still lay on the carpet. He stared at the gun before picking it up, hefting it thoughtfully in his hand and then setting it on the bedside table.

"My life is such a freak show there isn't a definition of normal that could sort me out right now." He sat down heavily, cheap bedsprings groaning under his weight. He rested his elbows on his knees and propped his head in the cradle of his hands. "But, I'm not going with you. Not today. I just-" He didn't finish the thought, just shook his head in his hands. Bereft and rudderless. When he looked up his eyes were alive but hollow. Haunted. "I just don't know what else to do. He's my baby brother. It should be me down there, or me down there with him, not Sammy against -." Dean's voice choked off, unable to find the right words to describe what Sam was going through. To be fair, he didn't think there was any word in any language that could desribe it. "Sammy's been running away for years, he shouldn't have had to go all the way to Hell to get away from me."

She sat next to him, slid her hand through his hair and waited for him to look at her.

"I don't need to be here anymore," she said, "and you'll do what you always do. You'll go on. Survive. You'll be Dean. Whether that's good or bad the Universe hasn't determined yet. And when it's time, we'll meet again." Her smile wasn't particularly beautiful or kind, but it was reassuring. He reached out a hand and tentatively ran a finger over a small patch of carpet burn on her cheekbone.

Tessa closed her eyes and Dean had the sensation again of staring through warped glass, and then the red mark was gone. She dropped the edge of the bedspread to show his bite marks had disappeared and her skin was as pale and unblemished as when she had first appeared. His smile was wan and joyless, completely without any of its usual sardonic humor, settling into something grim and determined as he rested his forhead back in his hand and reached for her with the other. When he pulled her to the bed and gently pushed her back into the pillows, she let him, nestling into the spoon of his body. She watched the sun come up through a slat in the blinds, and stayed motionless when he kissed her lightly on the head and slipped away with the skill of man well practiced at such departures.

When she heard the hiss and rush of the shower she tossed the hem of the covers away from her body. She was dressed again before they hit the floor. Jeans, boots, jacket. She paused to flip her hair out of her collar before slipping back into the riptide of existence.

Tessa would have liked to have told Dean Winchester that she liked him in this world, that his decision pleased her. At the very least he lent a new flavor to an otherwise predictable existence. But there was only so much influence an agent of Death could have on the living, and she was already treading a fading line.


	3. Chapter 3

This time he didn't feel like he was _trying_ to boil the meat from his bones as he stood in the shower and scalded himself, but there was certainly more going on than just lather, rinse, repeat. He lingered, pressed his head against the cool tiles as he let the scorching water crawl over the skin on his back until it itched. He thought about the woman he had left dozing in the bed in the next room, and the brother who quite possibly _was_ having the flesh boiled from his bones at that very moment. Tessa's was one of those encounters he would have ordinarily ended by sneaking out before she woke up, not because he wanted to avoid any awkward entanglements, but because of sheer embarassment. If she'd been human, he had no doubt he'd be standing in hand cuffs right now.

If the dull edge of guilt about Tessa was like a bruise tender to the touch, then that harder, sharper ache for Sammy was a gutting. Without lifting his head, Dean reached behind himself and fumbled with the faucet, turning the water off and shivering as the air touched his skin with chill fingers. He stood there, head bent, unable to move forward, feeling like a bug trapped in amber. The towel, hanging off the curtain rod, was too far away. The clothes, tossed in a ball on the back of the toilet, required far more problem solving skills than he was capable of at the moment. Each step, from drawing breath to starting his car and driving away, Sam-less, seemed to require more from him than he was capable of giving. It wasn't a post lay lethargy, it was a bone aching malaise that had sapped even his will to lift a gun to his own head. It was, he realized, a dullness born of indecision. He stood at the apex of his life and he didn't know what direction to go without Sammy to push or pull or drag along kicking and screaming with him.

"All new beginnings start, usually, at the beginning." Dean whipped around at the voice, slow, cultured, as though choosing every word carefully and yet still unconcerned with human schedule or convention. The gaunt gentleman leaned casually against the wall at the back of the small bathroom, each piece of his suit neatly in place on his thin frame. His skeletal face regarded Dean with dark beetle eyes that might have been measuring his worth from across a vast space and not the cramped confines of a narrow hotel bathroom. He looked unimpressed, as always, with what he saw.

"Jesus Christ!" Dean grabbed for the towel and whipped it in front of himself.

"Hardly. Nor would I be so concerned with your...modesty. You are all born naked and so you die, ultimately."

"Well, I'm not dead yet, and when I do die, it won't be with my junk hanging out. A little privacy please?" The sudden jolt of adrenaline made Dean amped up and nauseous. Besides the unnerving fact that Death himself was standing in his bathroom, Dean felt mildly chagrined that his private pity party had suddenly been crashed.

Death adjusted his cuffs, tugged at the hem of his jacket and strolled casually past Dean toward the bathroom door. With his hand on the knob, he paused and said "Do hurry, Dean, I haven't all day." And let himself out with a soft click of the door catching the latch behind him.

Dean thought about Tessa in the next room, eyes closed and her lips parted like a sleeping child, her mien deceptively peaceful, and felt the kind of guilt any boy feels when he hears the footstep of his girlfriend's parent on the stairs. Except, this particular man could, in fact, kill him with a look.

He dressed with deliberate haste, smoothing his hands over the wrinkles in his jeans and tucking his t shirt in. There was no hope for the flannel, and Dean only hoped the brown and white checked pattern hid most of the creases. When Death came calling, one tried to look their best. He ruffled his hand quickly through his hair, took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom.

The bed was empty. Tessa's clothes, which had been folded neatly over a chair, her boots fastidiously placed under the jeans that had been folded along their seams, gone. The room looked as though she had never been there. Part of him wondered if she ever had been.

"Where-?"

"Gone about her business," Death said from where he leaned on his cane next to the scarred table. He leaned over a bit, looked down his nose at the weapon that still sat there, forgotten for the moment. "I assume you won't be needing this, then?" He looked at Dean, who felt like a bug under a microscope. He couldn't decide if Death was somehow disappointed that his skull was still intact or not.

Dean leaned over and picked up his .45 from where he had set it earlier, tucked it into the back of his waistband. "No, not today." There was an awkwardness, a palpable sense of things unsaid hanging in the air between them as thick as the scent of sex and sweat. "Uh, about Tessa..."

Death raised a hand, sniffed imperiously. "No explanations are necessary, Dean. She's an attractive young woman, and we all have our picadillos, don't we?"

Dean considered Death's pentiant for Chicago pizza and greasy fast food and shrugged. He tried to look nonchalant as he said "I didn't mean, I mean, I shouldn't have-" he felt his shoulders hunch up, knew nonchalant was a lost cause and scratched the back of his neck where the hackles were beginning to rise. "We, she, aw crap." He felt like he should explain himself, but couldn't find any words reasonable enough that Death wouldn't have an excuse to put a permanent end to his current emotional trauma. It was a very real threat, and not one he wanted to court. Maybe last night, but not now.

"If she hadn't been a consenting participant, we'd be having a completely different conversation, Dean." Death stood up straighter, an unnecessary correcting of his posture, and stared pointedly at Dean.

"As it is, she was, and I'm willing to overlook certain...indiscretions. What I'm interested in now, Dean, is what are your plans?"

"I, uh, hadn't got that far." He didn't have a plan. Twelve hours ago his plan had involved a well placed bullet in his brain pan. Plans weren't something that worked well for the Winchester boys, not together, and certainly not for Dean alone. It was a startling hiccup in his thought process, the idea of him, alone. No Dad. No Sam. If he got right down to the bare bones of it, he'd never really ever been alone. The first time Dad had left him alone, he'd gone running off to Sammy. Even in Hell, there was never an 'alone'. He wondered if he wouldn't have cracked that much sooner if they had found out that he was more afraid of 'alone', like an animal he kept shut away, than he had ever been of the rack, the fire, the fileting of his soul. Which was the train of thought that brought him back around to the station Sammy was at. In The Pit, not alone and more alone than he should be.

"What makes you worrisome, Dean Winchester, is that you are most dangerous when you don't have a plan." Death moved casually through the room, inspecting small things, poking at this or that as though it might be a living thing that would bite him back. He stopped over the open duffel bag, his back turned. Poked at it with his walking stick and moved on.

"Might I suggest a few things you shouldn't do?" He picked up the letter addressed to Lisa, turned it over in his hands before staring at it like he could read it through the envelope. For all Dean knew, he probably could.

"As if I could stop you." Incongruously, Dean felt his stomach rumble for the first time in days, nausea giving rise to hunger pangs, a solid hangover building up behind his eyes, and his teeth grinding with impatience. It suddenly seemed imperative to get out of this room, get back into the world where the chaos of it all could distract him before he was eaten up by this creeping grief. He ran his hand over his stomach, pressing deep to quiet the emptiness.

"Don't go looking for trouble," Death said, slowly turning to pierce Dean with his small, black eyes. "Don't go after your brother, don't show up at the gates of Hell, and don't try to pull him out of the Pit."

Dean couldn't quite grasp what he was being told. He felt like a toddler who had just been shown a whole new world of mischief he hadn't otherwise considered. If he was being told not to do it, then it could be done.

"Listen to me, Dean. The world is in a precarious balance. If you nudge it one way, or the other, by some misguided sense of family loyalty you could bring it all crashing down like the preverbial house of cards."

"What if I don't care?" Dean's voice held a level of bravado he didn't otherwise feel. He might verbally go toe to toe with Death, but he wasn't brave enough to so much as inch past the man to retrieve his brother's gun where it seemed abandoned on the table. Defying Death was like suicide by cop.

"You care, Dean. You and your brother made a remarkable sacrifice for a planet that was hardly deserving of it. There would be..." Death paused, searching for the right word before settling on "consequences," said in a tone that implied it was hardly adequate to describe what might happen, but accurate enough.

"I've been to Hell," Dean said, his voice low, lost, and a little dangerous. "It doesn't scare me anymore." He paced in a tight circle, hand rubbing the back of his neck absently. "You could rip my fucking liver out for breakfast and filet me by dinner for the rest of eternity and it would still feel better than what I feel right now." His voice started to rise and he squared his stance, crossing his arms over chest resolutely.

Death stilled in his slow perusal of the room. "There are moments, Dean Winchester, when I can see why you were Michael's first choice. I can even understand what Tessa sees in you. I'll even go so far as to say she's not a lady who's easily impressed. Then there are moments when I must restrain myself from reaching inside you and laying waste to your soul like so much dust." He snatched his boney hand in front of his face, illustrating to Dean that taking his soul would be no more taxing than crushing a bug.

Dean took a step back, mouth and jaw working against each other. He had intended to die in this hotel room, but now that he had the smallest sliver of hope that Sammy could be saved, only because Death told him not to, the unreliable censor in his brain suddenly clicked on and his mouth snapped shut.

"You foolish mortal. What you continually fail to understand is that while you are content to play fast and loose with your own life, you never seem to see the ripples it makes across the Universe. Every breath has consequences, every footstep you take, every choice to tug on one thread in the fabric of Being causes a snag somewhere you can't see." Death held up the envelope addressed to Lisa. "You care. Consider for a moment if those ripples, those snags you are so content to ignore rip through her life instead of yours."

"Is that a threat?" Could he sacrifice Lisa to save Sammy? His nose wrinkled like he smelled something bad when he realized he would sacrifice half the Northern Hemisphere if he could save Sammy. He swallowed the bitter taste of love and self loathing, a taste he was growing accostomed to.

"Merely an observation." Death put the envelope back where he found it, fastidiously nudging it back into the exact same spot he had picked it up from.

"You would do best to go to her," Death punctuated each word with a slight tap on the edge of the envelope. "Keep your promise, go to the girl, put this whole messy business behind you as best you can and stop unraveling a tapestry you don't even try to appreciate."

"Tessa-" He leaned against the cheap plaster board of the wall, a strip of peeling wallpaper caught in the fiber of his shirt and flaking away. He brushed it off, watched its slow drift to the floor, time stretching out to life and death proportions. Dean's head swam with too many emotions, too much feeling for a man used to tucking his chin in and shouldering through his issues like a line backer. Sammy. Tessa. The past five years and every step that should have zigged when they zagged.

He felt the guilt of a man who knew he had crossed a line and didn't know how to get back to the other side. He had rinsed her blood off himself in the shower, watched it tint the water pink and pool at the drain while he chewed over his own guilt. Cheap hotel soap couldn't wash away the stain of a man convinced he was becoming one of the monsters. As the pink water whirlpooled down the drain he wondered how much mystical power a Reapers virginal blood must have, what he had just wasted, and hated himself for it.

"Has a soft spot for you." Death cut him off his slow mental spiral, snapping his attention back from the rough patch of wallpaper where lay on the floor like a flake of flayed skin. "But she understands her place, and certainly won't abandon her post for one night's daliance. No matter how...enthusiastic...it might have been."

That was uncomfortably close to the mark, and probably the nicest way possible to describe what had happened last night.

"I, I know. I mean, I should at least say good bye. Or something." It occurred to him for the first time that he had been the one ditched at the first convenient opportunity. All things considered, it was the least he deserved.

"Unnecessary." Death flicked the back of his fingers in Dean's direction to indicate how insignificant a gesture it would be. "So, I can count on you to go to your lady friend? Admittedly, a bit tacky to wander straight from one woman's bed to another, but when were you ever one for social convention?"

Tessa watched the taillights of the Impala recede from view, unaffected by the light drizzle falling around her.

"He's going to her?"

"He always was. He just didn't realize it." Death turned to look at his Reaper briefly before returning his attention to the car growing smaller in the against the gray of the day.

"Good, it's the best place for him to be."

"I trust this trist is...concluded?"

"Yes, of course." Tessa dipped her head like a child caught after curfew. "I'm sorry."

"There's no need to apologize. Sometimes we need a taste of the human world to remind ourselves what our charges are leaving behind. I don't expect it to become a habit, however."

"No, sir. I shouldn't be seeing him again until it's his Time."

"Oh, my dear, don't make promises you can't keep. With Dean Winchester," Death turned stiffly toward her, the set of his mouth saying louder than his words that he doubted that very much, "One just never knows."

FINIS


End file.
